Do Pressings Remastered at 45 RPM Have Better Sound?

More Reviews and Commentaries for 45 RPM Pressings

No doubt some do, but based on our admittedly limited experience, we rather doubt any of the titles shown here, or from this series, are likely to be very good sounding.

I was going to write about the awful Holst The Planets with Previn from this series that I had played a few years back, but never got around to it.

Lots of punchy, powerful and deep bass — yes, 45 RPM mastering is known for that — but the dry, overly clean, clear, modern sound and the screechy strings made me take it off the turntable halfway through the first side. (We write more about EMI and Angel pressings here.)

If you want a good sounding pressing of The Planets, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

As usual, our advice is to accept no substitutes. There are a lot of bad sounding, poorly performed Planets out there.

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Wes Montgomery – A Day In The Life

More of the Music of Wes Montgomery

  • A vintage copy of this 1967 jazz favorite with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to last – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Another triumph for Rudy Van Gelder and his unerring skill at getting all the musical elements to work together
  • The first album Creed Taylor produced for A&M was A Day in the Life with Wes Montgomery, just days after the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper (and which Wes never heard before recording this album!)
  • “There is a notable quality that each Wes recording seems to retain – they just seem to be getting better as the years go by.” – Pat Metheny

This superb album includes Montgomery’s great cover of A Day In The Life on side one and killer tracks like Eleanor Rigby, Willow Weep for Me, Windy and The Joker on side two!

It’s damn near impossible to find decent sounding early pressings, but the sound here is very good. There are plenty of dull, lifeless, overly compressed copies out there. That sound becomes especially offensive when the strings come in, most notably in the climactic middle section of “A Day In The Life.”

Fortunately for everyone who loves this kind of guitar-led jazz, our Hot Stampers have the warm, rich sound that let you enjoy this wonderful music without causing your ears to bleed. (more…)

The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

  • An Emotional Rescue like you’ve never heard, with a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • “Dance (Pt. 1)” and “She’s So Cold” sound great on this copy, and the title track, “Emotional Rescue,” is every bit as good
  • An underrated Stones album – too good to call a guilty pleasure – and very well-recorded by Chris Kimsey
  • Maybe it’s good because “Mick Jagger sounds like he’s having a great time…” – Eric Klinger, PopMatters.com

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Brahms & Dvorak / Hungarian & Slavonic Dances / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Brahms Available Now

UPDATED in 2022 for CS 6198

The last time we played copies of this London title, CS 6198, we were quite a bit less impressed than the review below might lead you to believe.

We found the sound to be plenty Tubey Magical, but the louder peaks were sour. Overall we judged the sound to be OK at best.

Having played a number of different pressings over the years, our favorite recording of the Slavonic Dances these days is the one with Kertesz on the Decca World of Great Classics budget reissue label.

It may come as a shock to some record collecting audiophiles, but there are actually budget reissues of some titles that can beat any and all comers.

Here are some that we’ve come across, discoveries which we are happy to share with you.

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Looking Ahead! – Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Available Now

The Contemporary Yellow Label stereo reissue from the 70s we played way back when, probably fifteen or twenty years ago, was a good record, but not nearly as good as some of the other Contemporary pressings we’d come across since we began collecting them in the early 90s.

(Yes, we admit, we got a late start, but by the time 1995 rolled around we knew just how good this label’s records could sound, something that not everybody else did.)

Live and learn is our motto — and that approach turns out to be a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

Experimenting with records is the only sure way to learn about them.

Our notes for the copy we put up years ago:

Another wonderful Contemporary LP. This Yellow Label Stereo pressing was a nice step up from most of what we heard, earning an A++ on side one and an A+ on side two. Side one was particularly good — the bottom end is superb, the vibra-harp sounds great and the piano has good weight. There’s lots of energy and the overall sound is big and open.

Side two was clean, clear and transparent but not quite as dynamic as side one.

Not an easy record to come by, and they usually don’t sound this good when you manage to track one down.

A top quality pressing of the album is a very different animal, a jazz Demo Disc of the highest order.

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Letter of the Week – “I have heard this music a zillion times but it never ever once sounded like this.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Five Star Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased many years ago:

Hey Tom, 

I just listened to Bridge over Troubled Water that arrived while I was on my trip to India. It was really spectacular. I have heard this music a zillion times over the last 40 years but it never ever once sounded like this. Amazing. I have to get Bookends and PSRT also. 

John R.

John,

We love it when customers tell us that our Hot Stamper pressings are a revelation. At these prices they’d better be!

This album has been remastered many times, but as far as we know you just cannot beat the right 360 Label pressings, which is why those are mostly the ones we sell, with an occasional Red Label pressing rarely, and barely, making the grade.

We’ve auditioned many pressings of the album, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS Half-Speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999.

No doubt there have been many more remastered since those three came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days, so we haven’t bothered to audition any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time. If one comes our way, naturally we would love to hear it.

Would we pay good money for whatever crap pressing they’re stocking the bins with these days? Not a chance. If any of the labels currently making records start to make some that sound as good as the ones we sell, please drop us a line with the titles that impressed you.

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Universal Heavy Vinyl Quadrophenia Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

UIPDATE 2026

These are old notes from many years ago. Take them with a very large grain of salt, and don’t buy this version of the album unless it’s reasonably priced and returnable. A pressing with Hot Stampers is going to be dramatically better, and might sound as good as this pressing.

Wow! This Universal Heavy Vinyl pressing from circa 2000 (the turn of the century!) is superb, not all that far from a good Track original, and quieter for sure. 

Side One rocks incredibly hard from start to finish. What a great album. It has to rank right up there with the best rock of the ’70s, right behind Who’s Next and probably on a par with Tommy, good company indeed, since we LOVE all three of those albums here at Better Records. (Both Tommy and Who’s Next are Top 100 titles, but Quadrophenia is not far behind either of them for sound or music.

Here’s what we wrote about this pressing when it was still in print ten twenty or more years ago.

Thank you Universal! We have almost forgiven you for the Cat Stevens records you ruined. With more great releases like this one, that debacle will fade one day from memory.

Although you can still buy those crappy pressings from my competitors. Have they no shame?

As with any Who album, this is obviously not your average Audiophile Demo Disc. We don’t imagine you’ll be enjoying this one with wine, cigars, and polite conversation. This one is for turning up loud and rockin’ out — in other words, it’s our kind of record.

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Thoughts on One of the Most Dynamic Contemporary Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

This commentary was written in 2008.

Intensity is right — this is some SERIOUSLY GOOD SOUNDING alto saxophone led quartet jazz. AMG was right to give this one 4 1/2 stars — the musicianship is top notch and Pepper’s playing is INSPIRED throughout. 

The real surprise was how well recorded this album from 1963 is. I can’t recall a more DYNAMIC Contemporary. Pepper’s sax gets seriously LOUD in some passages. This is very much a good thing. Not only is he totally committed to the music, but the engineers are getting that energy onto the record so that we at home can feel the moment to moment raw power of his playing.

(Pepper was famous for saying that his playing is best when he just plays whatever he feels in the moment, and this record is the best kind of evidence for the truth of that claim.)

Of course, since this is a Roy Dunann recording, all the tubey magical richness and sweetness are here as well, but what is surprising is how transparent, spacious and clear the sound is. Some of Roy’s recordings can sound a bit dead (recording in your stockroom is not always the best for spaciousness) and sometimes are a bit thick as well. Not so here. But it should be pointed out that we liked what we heard from a previous shootout too.

Last time around we wrote:

This record has superb sound: you can actually hear the keys clacking on the man’s alto. And that sort of detail does not come at the expense of phony brightness as it would with your typical audiophile recording. The tonality of the sax, drums, and bass are right on the money, exactly the way we expect Roy DuNann’s recording to be.

This time around we got more extension out of the cymbals. Either these copies are better, were cleaned better, or were helped quite a bit by our new Townshend SuperTweeters. (Probably the last two more than the first one.) (more…)

Pet Sounds on DCC Is Yet Another Mediocre Remaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.

It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?

You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

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Welcome To the World of Hot Stampers, Where No Two Copies of an Album Sound the Same

New to the Blog? Start Here

The fundamental principle that is at the heart of understanding records is, like evolution, both a theory and a fact:

No two copies of a record sound the same.

That’s the undeniable reality of the analog LP, as well as the driving force that turned a hobby into a full-fledged livelihood for me and my staff of ten. (I have since retired and turned over the running of the business to my highly-trained, exceptionally-competent workers. They seem to like records almost as much as I still do.)

Many people find the ideas (and the prices!) on this website shocking. Frankly, they would be shocking to us too if we weren’t hearing such dramatic differences in the sound quality of the large numbers of copies we play every day.

Our staff devotes its time to finding, cleaning and playing as many pressings of an album as we can get our hands on. We take only the best sounding copies – we call them “Hot Stampers” – and make them available exclusively to those who appreciate (and can afford) the ultimate in analog sound.

What makes us unique in the world of record sellers is that we’re the only ones who base the price of their records on their sound quality. Although we’ve been finding Hot Stamper pressings for close to thirty years, it has only become the main focus of our business since the late-2000s.

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